HPCwire » QPACEhttp://www.hpcwire.com
Since 1986 - Covering the Fastest Computers in the World and the People Who Run ThemSun, 02 Aug 2015 12:39:43 +0000en-UShourly1http://wordpress.org/?v=4.2.3Manufacturing Exascalehttp://www.hpcwire.com/2014/07/07/manufacturing-exascale/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=manufacturing-exascale
http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/07/07/manufacturing-exascale/#commentsMon, 07 Jul 2014 07:00:58 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=13635Exascale systems are certainly the current buzz in high performance computing. While theoretical projections suggest the possibility to have an exascale system by 2018, reality tells us that a usable supercomputer of that size will require at least few years into the next decade. Simply adopting the current approach – more of the same but Read more…

]]>Exascale systems are certainly the current buzz in high performance computing. While theoretical projections suggest the possibility to have an exascale system by 2018, reality tells us that a usable supercomputer of that size will require at least few years into the next decade. Simply adopting the current approach – more of the same but bigger and faster – will not work, due to constraints in power availability, cost and scalability of applications. The entire HPC industry has taken very seriously the exascale challenge and a wealth of investments has been deployed in order to overcome what would otherwise be a possible showstopper for the progress in science and technology.

The challenge of building a supercomputer capable of executing exaflop/s calculations is holistic, involving every aspect of an HPC system design, from chip to application. Manufactures and integrators, in particular, have to master many disciplines like computer science, electronics, electrical engineering, mechanical engineering, thermodynamics and even hydraulics.

One HPC system manufacturer that has always nurtured skills and technologies that could prove useful to the exascale challenge is Eurotech, a global supercomputing and embedded systems company based in northern Italy.

Eurotech HPC division designs and manufactures HPC systems and delivers HPC solutions to a variety of customers. Eurotech makes every part of their HPC systems (boards, interconnects, water cooling, mechanics…) and hence retains the control over the entire system development. These competences, together with a history of successful collaborations with relevant European research institutions, have made Eurotech an ideal partner for exascale research projects.

At Eurotech, they think the big contribution they can give to exascale is taking computer science theory and the best technologies available into systems that are usable and affordable. This is the approach Eurotech has taken in research projects like DEEP and QPACE2, which are at the forefront of the European exascale run.

Both projects aim to develop novel HPC architectures, where accelerators, coupled with low power CPUs or CPU clusters, take the heavy part of the computation, delivering very high energy efficiency results.

“Eventually we aim to get products out of the R&D projects we are involved” – says Giovanbattista Mattiussi, marketing manager HPC at Eurotech – “For instance, in QPACE2 we are applying a new, extremely energy efficient and modular architecture which will provide the base for a new Aurora line. Productizing new technologies and architectures makes them usable and cost effective, so available to everybody”

Eurotech envisages that the combination of novel extremely energy efficient architectures and liquid cooling should provide the grounds to build exascale systems.

Regarding power consumption, Eurotech has always used an “energy aware” approach in their HPC design so that now they manufacture some of the most energy efficient machines in the market. Recently, Eurotech presented a new HPC architecture, based on X-Gene, the Applied Micro ARM 64 bit CPU, with the support for 4 Nvidia Tesla K40. This is an additional step in the direction of higher energy efficiency.

Contact cooling is widely used within Eurotech for applications other than HPC, like embedded computing. According to Paul Arts, R&D director at Eurotech, the competence for cooling and thermal design is far from new in the group. This has allowed the company to develop a sound experience in direct water cooling, taking it through different improvement stages to the new version of the Aurora hot direct cooling, lighter, more compact and more effective.

It is highly likely that future exascale systems will be heterogeneous, including in one system different computation and storage components, like processors, accelerators, FPGAs, NVMs… This is one of the reasons the company developed the Aurora Bricks, an innovative and modular HPC system that allows composing and configuring different types of HPC servers starting from out of the box components.

Also, exascale systems will use so many components, that it will be almost impossible for the whole system to operate without faults. Resiliency, so the ability to recover from faults, will be paramount. As a manufacturer, Eurotech aims to make their systems as much reliable as possible and also providing to applications all information they need to prevent and manage faults. The balance of prevention, system reliability and resilience is the most promising approach for large scale systems fault management.

Eurotech also thinks that technologies for exascale will be leveraged in many systems that won’t necessarily perform at exaflop/s level. Requirements for exascale, like extreme energy efficiency, density, heterogeneity, reliability will also fit many applications where now power, space and performance constraints are preventing feasible solutions. The fact Eurotech has an HPEC (high performance embedded computing) development centre in California demonstrates the will of the company to fulfil a pervasive high performance computing vision.

Building an exascale machine will be most probably possible soon. It is HPC system manufacturers that will have to make that machine affordable and usable. It is the HPC community that will need to develop the programming models needed to support a new generation of parallel applications.

]]>http://www.hpcwire.com/2014/07/07/manufacturing-exascale/feed/0Quantum Computer Simulation: New World Record on JUGENEhttp://www.hpcwire.com/2010/06/28/quantum_computer_simulation_new_world_record_on_jugene/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=quantum_computer_simulation_new_world_record_on_jugene
http://www.hpcwire.com/2010/06/28/quantum_computer_simulation_new_world_record_on_jugene/#commentsMon, 28 Jun 2010 07:00:00 +0000http://www.hpcwire.com/?p=5253The civil engineer Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin exactly 100 years ago. In 1941, he built the world's first computer. And thanks to his pioneering work, the scientists at the Jülich Supercomputing Center have now succeeded in setting a world record by simulating the largest quantum computer system with 42 qubits.

]]>The civil engineer Konrad Zuse was born in Berlin exactly 100 years ago. In 1941, he built the world’s first computer. And thanks to his pioneering work, the scientists at the Jülich Supercomputing Center have now succeeded in setting a world record by simulating the largest quantum computer system with 42 qubits. As yet, only small prototypes of quantum computers exist in laboratories, with a capacity of a few bits. This is now going to change.

Compared to the so-called quantum computers, today’s supercomputers would simply look old. A new project is aiming to catapult these impressive machines out of the realm of the hypothetical and into reality, or at least to raise the hope that such computers will not just be sketches on paper.

Low value, large effect

To understand the extent of the accomplishment, you have to grasp the underlying principle of a quantum system. “The computing power of a quantum computer grows exponentially with its size,” says Prof. Dr. Kristel Michielsen from the Jülich Supercomputing Center, and who heads the Institute for Advanced Simulation. “If a quantum computer is expanded by just one single computer bit, its computing power is immediately doubled due to the laws of quantum mechanics on which it is based.”

By contrast, the computing power of a classical computer only grows linearly with its components. Ten percent more transistors only means ten percent more performance, at best.

The qubit is still the smallest unit for quantum computers; however, they offer quite different possibilities. While the traditional 8-bit byte can represent 256 different values, quantum bytes have over 65,535 independent states. For computational operations, quantum computers use atoms and subatomic particles as transmission units. They are both the memory and the executing computational unit. This property would allow such a computer to perform computational operations simultaneously, to take on highly scientific tasks, and to control the cand decryption of data streams.

This last function is already no longer a secret in the world of cryptography. Since Phil Zimmermann placed his PGP encryption on the Internet with free access for everyone in 1991, anyone can easily encrypt their data stream. This cryptographic undertaking is naturally a thorn in the side of intelligence agencies because terrorists are also able to use it.

JUGENE: Europe’s fastest supercomputer Of course, if you want to simulate a quantum computer using a traditional computer, you soon run up against limitations. For a 42-qubit simulation, you need machines like the Jülich supercomputer. JUGENE is the fastest computer in Europe with almost 300,000 processors and a computing power of one quadrillion floating point operations per second. One billion people would each have to perform one million calculations per second on a calculator to get anywhere near as fast as that. On this machine, scientists succeeded in running Shor’s algorithm, one of the most common test applications for quantum computers, with 42 computer bits factorizing 15,707 into 113×139. “The simulation can now factorize numbers that are about a thousand times larger than those previously possible with experimental quantum computers,” says Michielsen proudly.

The simulation was built by enhancing existing software. When so many processors work together, it may easily be the case that threads are waiting for each other, leading to performance loss. The Jülich software is optimized to allow thousands of processors to work together seamlessly. Codes like this are able to scale almost perfectly. Scaling is the term computer scientists use to describe the property of software such that it is able to convert processors into computational performance in a linear manner.

Jülich is also at the heart of the QPACE project (QCD Parallel Computing on the Cell). In the future, the supercomputer center will come into even “greater consideration” for larger projects involving several research institutes. An international consortium consisting of six German and Italian universities and research centers plans to calculate simulations in quantum chromodynamics (QCD), a field of elementary physics. QCD describes how protons are built up of quarks and gluons. The work in this field can also help increase the understanding of the the fundamental forces of the universe. Here too, IBM, or more precisely IBM’s research and development center in Böblingen, Germany, is also supporting the prototype of a research computer that can handle such simulations.

Jülich’s red carpet

The QPACE concept consists of a network of programmable components, the so-called “field programmable gate arrays” (FPGAs) that connect processors to a powerful, scalable research computer. The prototype is intended to reach a maximum performance of up to 200 teraflops. Due to the scalability of the network employed, it is theoretically possible to increase the performance up into the petaflop range.

But quantum physics is not only an issue at Jülich. Quantum research has long since been an international business. It was the Danes who, as it were, rolled out Jülich’s red carpet in 2008. Dr. Henrik Ingerslev Jørgensen from the Niels Bohr Institute in Copenhagen succeeded in getting qubits to interact with each other. His results gave the first glimpse into understanding the interaction of two electrons lying next to each other in carbon nanotubes, which are tiny tubes made up of graphite layers.

A glance into the future

“Quantum computers are still a fascinating vision – nothing more,” says Michael Malms, head of High Performance Computing at the German IBM research and development center in Böblingen. “But if we look at the technical evolution that has been successful in a relatively short time in the area of high performance computing and project that into the future, then we cannot exclude the possibility that quantum computers too will one day become a reality.”

No doubt Konrad Zuse would be amazed if he were able to look at the cutting edge of computing research today. And it’s not just quantum computing. Scientists at the Weizmann Institute of Science in Rehovot in Israel are conducting research into the possibility of using synthetic genetic “snippets” as software. Enzymes that read, split and join DNA form the hardware. Then based on the aggregate number of such “computers,” they are able to parallelize computations. About three trillion such molecular computers are packed into a drop of water, and since they work simultaneously, they can theoretically perform 66 billion operations per drop. Zuse would have loved to hear this “pitter-pattering” of computing.

About the Author

Markus Henkel is a geodesist, science writer and lives in Hamburg, Germany. He writes about supercomputing, environmental protection and clinical medicine. For more information, email him at info@laengsynt.de or visit the Web site: http://laengsynt.de.